Contemporary Art Commons^™

"Seu Tesouro São Penas De Pássaro": Arte Plumária Tupinambá E A Imagem Da América, Amy Buono

Art Faculty Articles and Research

"Os povos tupinambá do Brasil dos séculos XVI e XVII foram a primeira grande cultura de arte plumária das Américas encontrada pelos europeus. Os tupi eram uma sociedade agrícola seminômade, que habitava as florestas ao longo de quatro mil quilômetros da costa brasileira3. Como a cultura tupi foi majoritariamente efêmera, centrada em tradições cerimoniais que envolviam dança, som, movimento e adornos, eles permanecem uma das grandes sociedades do Novo Mundo menos conhecidas. A maior parte dos traços da cultura material tupi se perdeu, com exceção de algumas cerâmicas, armas e, mais importante, muitas peças deslumbrantes de arte plumária."

Mexican Technoscientific Arts, 2000-2015: Art And Science, Machine Inventions, And Political Ecologies, Carlos R. Guzman

Dissertations and Theses

In the last decades, several artists have engaged directly with emerging digital technologies and science, the so-called new media arts. For the past fifteen or twenty years, such practices have experienced a paradigmatic transformation in Mexico, particularly in the capital. They have shifted from peripheral to mainstream, from contingent to ubiquitous, and from underground/experimental to official and governmentally funded.

This thesis explores the development of technoscientific arts in Mexico, its evolution, main artists, and institutions. It focuses on specific technoscientific artistic projects developed in Mexico between 2000 and 2015 by artists like Tania Candiani, Gilberto Esparza, Iván Puig, and Ale …

Good Game, Greyory Blake

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis and its corresponding art installation, Lessons from Ziggy, attempts to deconstruct the variables prevalent within several complex systems, analyze their transformations, and propose a methodology for reasserting the soap box within the display pedestal. In this text, there are several key and specific examples of the transformation of various signifiers (i.e. media-bred fear’s transformation into a political tactic of surveillance, contemporary freneticism’s transformation into complacency, and community’s transformation into nationalism as a state weapon). In this essay, all of these concepts are contextualized within the exponential growth of new technologies. That is to say, all of these semiotic …

Nam June Paik As A Pioneer Of Interactive Art, Byeongwon Ha

Theses and Dissertations

Nam June Paik (1932-2006) is well known as the father of video art. However, this study demonstrates the importance of his earlier interactive art (1961-63), which historically has been overshadowed by his video art. At the climax of his career in interactive art, Paik introduced his two-way art to the public at his first solo exhibition in Wuppertal, West Germany, in 1963. Interactive art itself has been a peripheral area in the history of art, and it has plural pioneers across disciplinary boundaries. Among the several origins of interactive art, Nam June Paik utilized music as a fundamental approach to …

Consuming Digital Debris In The Plasticene, Stephen R. Parks

Theses and Dissertations

Claims of customization and control by socio-technical industries are altering the role of consumer and producer. These narratives are often misleading attempts to engage consumers with new forms of technology. By addressing capitalist intent, material, and the reproduction limits of 3-D printed objects’, I observe the aspirational promise of becoming a producer of my own belongings through new networks of production. I am interested in gaining a better understanding of the data consumed that perpetuates hyper-consumptive tendencies for new technological apparatuses. My role as a designer focuses on the resolution of not only the surface of the object through 3-D …

Laminated Paint, Travis R. Austin

Theses and Dissertations

Though we may not perceive it, we are surrounded by material-in-flux. Inert materials degrade and the events that comprise our natural and social environments causally thread into a duration that unifies us in our incomprehension. Sounds reveal ever-present vibrations of the landscape: expressions of the flexuous ground on which we stand.

How Do You Depict The Life Of A Soul?: Word And Text In And As Image In Soviet Nonconformist Art, Matthew Blong

MA Theses

Visual artworks by Soviet nonconformist artists, especially those associated with the Moscow Conceptualist and Sots-Art movements of the mid-1960s to mid-1980s, prominently feature experimentations with word and text—both in and as image—for a wide variety of reasons that have been studied by scholars of Soviet and Russian art.

In this paper, a formal and conceptual analysis of nearly thirty text-and-image artworks by nonconformist artists of the period traces the motivations and inspirations for this highly creative and generative practice. Beginning with the desire to resume where the historic Russian avant-garde had left off, these artworks challenge notions of language as …

Invisible Invisibility, Eugina Song

Theses and Dissertations

White America assumes its culture is the default, and Asian culture as foreign and irrelevant. I address Asian invisibility by using canvas structure as a Western framing device of painting, and make this cultural barrier visible by breaking out of the frame. Deriving from Dansaekhwa, I challenge the Western painting structure with materiality.

Curating Contemporary Japanese Art: Exhibition Catalogue Production For Hidden Landscapes: Yasuaki Onishi And Invisible Space, Emily Lawhead

Master's Projects and Capstones

In the last decade, there has been a telling increase of attention given to contemporary Asian artists exhibited in the United States and Europe. Since 2008, artists from China, Japan, South Korea, and Central Asia have been featured in exhibitions from the Venice Biennale to the Whitney Biennale, and are becoming ever more present on the Western art stage. Meanwhile, curatorial practice, once focused on the care of objects, is shifting to encompass a wider range of creative activity. Curators are taking time to engage with living artists in a collaborative setting, rather than as impartial facilitators. This capstone seeks …

Perspectives On Video Games As Art, Jeroen Bourgonjon, Geert Vandermeersche, Kris Rutten, Niels Quinten

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Perspectives on Video Games as Art" Jeroen Bourgonjon, Geert Vndermeer­sche, Kris Rutten and Niels Quinten engage in discussing whether or not video games can be considered a form of art. Although this question has already been discussed elaborately, the debate is guided by many differ­ent and often conflicting positions. The aim of this article is to revisit this debate by mapping out a range of perspectives on video games as art. The authors explore the relation between games and differ­ent definitions and functions of art, different motives of artists, and the potential impact of the arts. The …

“What You See Is What You Get: The Artifice Of Insight”: A Conversation Between R. Luke Dubois And Anne Collins Goodyear, Anne C. Goodyear

Artl@s Bulletin

The metaphorical relationship between sight and knowledge has long been recognized: the double-entendre of “illumination” promises both light and understanding; “I see” signifies that one “gets it” intellectually. This conversation between R. Luke DuBois and Anne Collins Goodyear addresses how data accrues meaning through pictorial structures that represent it. An artist, DuBois has consistently played with conventions for depicting information visually, revealing the intersections between data and desire they represent. Reexamining the interfaces through which we view the world, DuBois and Goodyear consider what our filters threaten to hide.

La relation métaphorique entre la vue et la connaissance a longtemps …

Network Analysis And Feminist Artists, Michelle Moravec

Artl@s Bulletin

This article examines the benefits and drawbacks of using social network analysis to study feminist artists’ networks. Looking at two of the author’s digital humanities projects, it explores the systemic and structural barriers that limit the utility of social network analysis for feminist artists. The first project on the social network of artist Carolee Schneemann analyzed her female circles through a correspondence network. The second project attempted to trace the circulation of feminist art manifestos in American feminist periodicals. Three factors are identified as constraining network analysis in these case studies, the lack of feminist artists’ archives, an insufficient amount …

Cultural Imprint: A History Of Northwest Coast Native And First Nations Prints, India Rael Young

Art & Art History ETDs

Cultural imPRINT provides the first substantive art historical investigation into Northwest Coast Indigenous prints. Since the 1960s, Northwest Coast artists have employed the print medium to share their histories, heritage, and culture amongst each other and with the larger world. Because print artists number in the hundreds, and print editions in the thousands, this dissertation takes a socio-cultural approach to understanding the purposes for the medium’s production and circulation. First, it analyzes the deep histories of reproduction in the North American art world and in Northwest Coast Indigenous communities, asserting that reproduction within coastal communities serves to perpetuate history from …

Caitlin Keogh: Feminine Feminism, Madeline Beck

The Kennesaw Journal of Undergraduate Research

The painter Caitlin Keogh (b. 1982) is a rising star in the Contemporary Art scene in the United States. Currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York, Keogh is one of countless emerging painters in the trendy arts hub, but her work is already receiving international attention and critical acclaim. Her refined use of flat figuration and bold but pastel colors combined with her striking subject matter has situated Keogh distinctly in the massive contemporary art scene today. Keogh’s insertion of feminist discourse, personal identity, and appropriated imagery into her paintings begs a thorough analysis of her work. She implements …

Posthumanist Animals In Art: France And Belgium, 1972-87, Arnaud Gerspacher

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation traces the changing role and increased importance of nonhuman animals in art of the 1970s and 80s. Focused largely on artists in France and Belgium, this period stands at the head of a wide-ranging re-conceptualization of animality that continues to unfold today. Pivotal moments in ecology (beginning with the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm), animal ethics and ethology (such as the Universal Declaration of Animal Rights proclaimed in 1978), and philosophy (specifically the biopolitical and deconstructive currents critiquing the centrality of the humanist subject), all converge as stress points along long held anthropocentric …

Políticas De Lo Estético En La Ilustración De Ciencia Ficción. El Caso De “Think Blue, Count Two” De Cordwainer Smith, Silvia Gabriela Kurlat Ares

Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

Desde el período del Dadá se han ido borrando los límites entre las formas artísticas y sus soportes, entre las estéticas de uso y las estéticas formales, entre los espacios altos y bajos de producción cultural, y también, entre la percepción de centros y periferias que parecen haberse astillado y reproducido a la interioridad de espacios hasta hacer de la hegemonía misma, al decir the Beasley Murray, un concepto no sólo inestable sino casi inexistente. En el caso de la ciencia ficción, esa porosidad hace a la constitución misma de una estética que opera desde la factura del naturalismo pero …

Desert Pool {If Every Desert Was Once A Sea}, Karen Miranda Abel

The Goose

Desert Pool {If every desert was once a sea} is a site-specific art project by Canadian artist Karen Miranda Abel completed in 2016 while artist-in-residence at Joya: arte + ecología, an arts-led research centre situated in an alpine desert within a national park in southern Spain. The elemental installation represents an envisioning of the ancient sea that occupied the Sierra de María-Los Vélez Natural Park millions of years before the current desert ecology, a time when its highest mountain peaks may have been islands.

Heavy Ink: A Documentary On The Comicbook Revolution, Renzo Adler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Heavy Ink is a documentary short focusing on the comic anthology magazine, Heavy Metal, examining its history as both a standout comic magazine, and how it fits into the larger tradition of comic books. What started off in 1977 as a sci-fi offshoot of National Lampoon ushered in a new era of comics by bridging the gap between American and European comic sensibilities with a talent pool from all over the world.

Heavy Metal would go on to have reverberations beyond comics into music, movies, and the global entertainment landscape of today. Heavy Metal introduced the world to artists such …

Review Of Peruvian Featherworks: Art Of The Precolumbian Era, Amy Buono

Art Faculty Articles and Research

A review of Peruvian Featherworks: Art of the Precolumbian Era, edited by Heidi King.

Zero Textbook Cost Syllabus For Art 1012 (Art History Survey Ii), Karen Shelby

Open Educational Resources

This introductory course presents a global view of art history through slide lectures and museum visits, with an emphasis on works of art found in New York City museums. It selectively surveys the visual arts of Europe from the Renaissance to the twentieth century and concurrent historical periods in Asia (India, China, Japan), Africa, Mesoamerica, South America, Native North America, and the United States.